Mind games make westerns compelling

March 18, 2007|By Michael Phillips, Tribune movie critic

I don't remember playing cowboys and Indians much when I was a kid, though I'm sure the rest of the neighborhood did. Probably I was inside watching "Horse Feathers," or "Sons of the Desert." Besides, my dad had a de-activated grenade from his Army days, so the grenade was a lot more intriguing than any toy six-shooter. It became the key prop in countless games of make-believe slaughter. Also we played "stuntman," which was all about deliberate bicycle accidents and their aftermath. These required no grenade.

Maybe if I grew up wanting to be John Wayne, it wouldn't have taken me so long to develop a taste for a select but growing roster of movie westerns. It's heresy, especially to those who consider John Ford not just a peerless American director but America incarnate, but even now I can't acquire any personal zest for portentous classics such as "The Searchers." Or George Stevens' "Shane." And as much as I admire Howard Hawks' "Red River," on the list of Hawks films I'd happily see again tonight, it's well behind "Bringing Up Baby," "Only Angels Have Wings," "His Girl Friday," "To Have and Have Not," "The Big Sleep" and, though he wasn't credited, "The Thing."

For years I thought, well, the western genre simply isn't my genre. Then I saw a couple of them that opened my eyes to the genre's capacity for stories built upon psychological pressure as much as brute physical conflict or tidy morals about right and wrong. (A handy guide to the difference between morals and ethics: A moral dilemma concerns right versus wrong; an ethical dilemma concerns right versus right.)

Anthony Mann made a series of pictures with James Stewart, westerns of a different quality and texture than the ones I was used to seeing. One of the best is "The Naked Spur" (1953), in which Stewart's bounty hunter matches wits with a wily criminal played by Robert Ryan. Ryan's chortle could unnerve any flawed protagonist, but by the time Stewart arrives at the end of his quest (shot in vibrant Colorado Rockies color by William Mellor), he's nearly a broken man. Stewart's performance, shot through with panic and physical torment, points to the emotional vulnerability he would explore in Hitchcock's "Rear Window" and especially "Vertigo."

The other modestly scaled, unpretentious western tale that turned the corner for me was "3:10 to Yuma" (1957), directed by Delmer Daves. (It's being remade; we'll see how that goes.) Beaten-down, drought-ridden farmer Van Heflin keeps watch over captured outlaw Glenn Ford, but the mind games Ford's character plays on Heflin's lead to a resolution of surprising ethical complexity. Plus it's just plain suspenseful. These two films reminded me: You can't judge any genre by works buckling under the weight of their most fervent admirer's praise.